Attempted Chemistry by Jeff Gomez

Author:Jeff Gomez
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504023887
Publisher: The Permanent Press (ORD)

Walking through Tompkins Square after dinner, Daniel and Eileen hold hands. It’s almost eight but the park’s still crowded with handball games, the homeless, punk rock squatters, walkers, joggers, dozens in the dog run (black dogs lost in the increasing night), basketball and even baseball in the far corner, Avenue A and Tenth. Through the tall trees, their bright leaves turned hunter green, a sunset peeks out: orange and purple and blue. A breeze cools hot foreheads but, with the humidity, it’s still muggy. Outside feels like the inside of someone’s shower.

“Do you miss your old place, Daniel?”

Between moving out of Keith’s and moving in with Eileen he had lived in a studio apartment just a few blocks from here, on Avenue B. The question seems to him slightly veiled, as if she were really asking, “Do you wish you’d never moved in with me?”

“Sometimes,” he answers, honestly. “I miss the mornings, having coffee and a few cigarettes in the park. Plus, it’s close to Nino’s, and close to where I get my coffee. There are some good bakeries around here, too. Good stuff to eat in the morning.”

Eileen takes this as a veiled response. You can get coffee and smoke cigarettes where we live.

“But the noise, and the drug dealers. At first it was fun to know that, at four o’clock in the morning, I could get either heroin or a slice of pizza.”

“And the heroin was closer.”

He stops and laughs darkly at this, the way you laugh at truth because you have to.

“But that apartment was so small, and expensive. That it was small bothered me more than the money I was throwing away every month because I’m sure I would have wasted the money anyhow. On books, probably. I just hated the fact that, once you opened the door and the person walked in, that’s all there was to showing the place off. Open the door and bang, Daniel Lightman in a nutshell. Was so small,” he laughs, “it felt like a nutshell.”

“Nutshell,” she repeats, to show she’s been listening.

They round a corner and he guides her to a section of the park where a children’s playground is locked up with thick chains.

“You know, right here, between these two fences, is where I took the picture for your Valentine’s Day card.”

Eileen stops and looks at the square of bare black-top and tries to imagine the heart outline in snow that Daniel made with his feet which he preserved seconds later with his camera, using the photo as the front of a homemade card. His hands had been shaking so badly that day he feared his shivering would not only ruin the picture, but also force him to drop the camera to the ground, ruining all of his pictures. He’d tried to press the button with his gloves on but his finger—multiplied in size due to the layers of fabric—was too thick to poke into the shallow indentation on the silver camera. He had to pull both gloves off for every photo.

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